Michael Kurland has been a full-time professional writer all of his adult life, except for brief interludes when he taught high school English, was road manager of an unsuccessful rock and roll band, directed plays for an amateur theater group, worked for a private detective agency, was managing editor of Crawdaddy, a national music magazine, and was even, briefly, a book publisher. He has also done free-lance editing, copyediting and book reviewing for various publishers and magazines.
After four years in the Army Security Agency, Kurland attended Columbia University and began writing professionally while still a student. He was nominated for an Edgar award for A Plague of Spies, an installment of the War Inc. trilogy, and then again for The Infernal Device, also a finalist for the American Book Award. His political thriller The Last President made it to several Best Seller lists.
Kurland has also written a number of non-fiction books, notably Irrefutable Evidence, and How to Solve a Murder, on forensics, How to Try a Murder, on how murder trials work, and It’s a Mystery to Me, in which he attempts to pass on what he’s learned about writing mysteries.
Kurland’s most recent novel, The Bells of Hell, is a political espionage thriller which travels from New York and Washington DC to Berlin and back in the days just before the start of WWII. The story explores, among other things, the Fascist ideology prevalent in the US at the time and its infiltration by Nazi agents.
Kurland lives on California’s central coast, midway between San Francisco and Los Angeles. His partner, Linda Robertson, is a novelist and a criminal lawyer. They share their house with a dog and a cat, and their back yard with at least two raccoons, several opossums, various representatives of the suborder Sauria, and perhaps two dozen fruit trees.